


A Liar's Truth

by mllemaenad



Series: Joanna Hawke [1]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games)
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-20
Updated: 2015-03-20
Packaged: 2018-03-18 18:07:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,738
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3578922
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mllemaenad/pseuds/mllemaenad
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When a person becomes a story, things are left out or changed. Varric Tethras knows this better than anyone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Liar's Truth

Varric wrote a Hawke who never was.

 

The important parts are true, he’ll swear to that. Sure he’s a rogue, a liar and a businessman, but he’s got his standards: he wouldn’t sell the world a dud hero. Hawke is soft spoken but deadly; her eyes are sharp and her mirth kindly, and she has never turned away a friend or forgotten an enemy. She bled rivers – oceans – to protect a city that would damn itself out of spite or stupidity or sheer bloody-mindedness. She slew demons, Templars, blood mages and Qunari, and even had the guts to sass Meredith on the steps of the Viscount’s Keep.

 

Hawke’s the real deal, Kirkwall’s own Champion. But there’s more than one way to tell a lie.

 

He made the scar that crosses her face rakish and charming, honourably earned in her duel with the Arishok. But he left out the sounds she made as she collapsed on the throne room floor beside the giant twitching body. He left out the way the people, the _captives_ , turned away from her in horror, and that the smell of blood and death in the air made some of them vomit. He left out Anders, white and frantic, kneeling at her side, trying to prise her red-slicked fingers away from the wound. “Let me – love, let me see,” as though Meredith weren’t even there.

 

He certainly left out her expression when she first saw her face in a glass, after.

 

He filled her up with righteous anger when she slew Orsino for falling to blood magic, and he brought her boot down on the ruined remains of his face from the great heights of moral outrage. He didn’t put in the dull, despairing look in the First Enchanter’s eyes, or how he hurried them and the weeping apprentices they were defending through an obscure side door as the battering ram brought down the front gate. He left out the sound of splintering wood behind them, and how they turned from fighting Templars and demons to find a monster at their backs. He didn’t say that Hawke only used her feet because she was crying too hard to use her bow.

 

People call these things _plot holes_. They make lists and ask him questions, like they’ve somehow caught him out. Varric just grins and tells another lie. He gave the world as much of Hawke as it deserved – maybe even a little more. But her broken heart isn’t for sale at any price.

 

He watches her, sidelong, now as she sits beside him on Skyhold’s battlements. Her long legs are hanging over the ledge, and her heel is kicking idly at the stone wall; she’s got the bottle they’ve filched from the tavern clasped loosely between finger and thumb. He doesn’t think about how tired she looks. There’s no point in that: he’s been thinking that every day since he dragged her off on the stupid treasure hunt that tore both their families apart. It just gets truer as time goes on. Funny how that only holds for ugly things.

 

He _does_ think that, if he gives in to the hints and nudges and pens a sequel, he’ll make her happier than she is now. He’ll make her offer to stay behind in the Fade pure selfless nobility, and leave out the guilt and the fear. He’ll put in her long limbs – the Seeker thought she was _short_ – and clever hands drawing a bowstring against a new set of demons, and skip the lines coming in around her eyes.

 

“I could come,” he offers, and tilts his eyes skywards, just taking in the stars. “To Weisshaupt. I hear they’re broodier than Fenris out there. Seeing that alone would be worth the trip.”

 

Hawke snickers a bit, and takes a swig from the bottle. “What – all three of us?”

 

“Four, if we count your dog.” Varric holds out his hand for the bottle, and drinks when she passes to him. “He’s got more sense than any of us.”

 

“You’re just saying that because he beat you at cards,” says Hawke, but she is already shaking her head. “Better you don’t. I’ve brought you enough trouble – you don’t need my luck. Besides, I think they need you here. They’re a worthy lot – but utterly mad. Someone has to keep the peace.”

 

_“It’s not better. You’re no more cursed than the rest of us_ ,” he wants to say, but doesn’t. It does no good.

 

“A Qunari, a Tevinter, a _Loyalist_ , an apostate, a bunch of Chantry castoffs – plus Her Inquisitorialness,” he says instead. “I’m not sure if we’re trying to save the world or start the strangest riot ever.”

 

“You’ll manage.” Hawke nudges him with her elbow, her voice full of fondness and a confidence he thought she’d lost. “I know you: you always do.”

 

“We’re taking bets on the world ending, if you’re interested,” he informs her, only half in jest. Then, finally, he asks, “So. How is he?”

 

Hawke’s eyebrows all but touch her hairline, and she snags the bottle back. “He’ll be stunned to hear you care.”

 

Varric is silent. They both know his friendship is a strange and enduring thing. He won’t talk to Anders or look him in the eye, but he’d cross Thedas in the space of a week to keep him from harm. He’d do it in half that time for Hawke’s sake.

 

“Leaving the rebellion was … hard,” Hawke says at last, and her mouth twists with sorrow and worry. “But we didn’t fit there. They don’t need us. They need the characters from your book, or maybe the ones they made up in their own heads. But we get by. There’s always work to do somewhere, and he has as many good days as bad ones.”

 

_“Be careful,”_ Varric wants to say, and still he doesn’t. He tried that line already, and besides, he’s got no room to talk: the Bianca situation is at least as stupid as shacking up with a possessed mage. He flubbed Anders at the end – he’ll own up to that. From an authorial standpoint he’s pretty damn perfect: hero and villain and epic tragedy all rolled into one. But that doesn’t take into account Varric’s own anger, and messed up sense of loyalty, and what Anders means to Hawke. There was no ending that he could write that was true, fair and wouldn’t bring Hawke pain she didn’t deserve.

 

_“But – what happened to the mage?”_ people ask.

 

“ _I don’t want to know,”_ he tells them, implying they shouldn’t either. Some endings are better left open to interpretation. It’s safer that way.

 

“If you need anything …” Varric offers, trying vainly to think of something that will help.

 

“Well,” Hawke says, and she manages to smile a bit as she meets his eyes, “you might ask your Qunari friend if he can get the Ben-Hassrath to lay off. We’re not selling their precious powder to anyone. Not now, not ever.”

 

“ _Still_?” Varric is incredulous. He knows the Qunari can be single-minded, but there’s no sign since the Chantry in Kirkwall that their big secret is out. In fact, he doubts that anybody outside their circle even knows that wasn’t done by magic. Well, except the Qunari. But who knows how _they_ know what they know?

 

“Still,” says Hawke, ruefully. “They’re like the weather: we get assassins every day for a week, and then nothing at all for a month. They get a bit tiring.”

 

“I’ll try, Hawke,” he promises her. “It might even work. Tiny’s got more pull than you might think.”

 

Hawke is given to understatement: he knows that. If she says these assassins are tiring, it means she lies awake in fear of them.

 

“I can’t say that surprises me,” Hawke says drily. “From what I hear, he’s talked half of Skyhold into bed, Chantry sisters and all. The Ben-Hassrath should be easy to woo by comparison. Thank you, Varric.”

 

Varric chuckles appreciatively. He’s missed Hawke’s keen eye – every bit as good for gossip as for a clean shot from a longbow. “No problem.”

 

She brings the bottle to her lips again, and grimaces her disappointment. “I think we’re dry,” she says, and sets it down beside her.

 

“I could fetch another,” he offers, but he knows what she’ll say before he’s finished speaking.

 

“No, I should turn in. I should be gone at daybreak. I should …”

 

She is tense again, thinking of the future, and Varric can’t be sure whether she is more afraid of bringing trouble to the Inquisition, or of what she might find when she returns to her latest hiding place. If he pens this scene, it will be neither of those things that drives her: she will be restless and eager to start work, a hero with a new cause to pursue.

 

“He’ll be fine,” tells her, trying to sound neither doubtful nor sour. “If anybody could be called fireproof, it’s him. And we’ll be fine. Around here, we get weirder shit than Qunari assassins before breakfast.”

 

Hawke slings an arm around his shoulders, and presses a fierce kiss to his forehead. “You take care of yourself, Varric. I don’t know where I’d be without my trusty dwarf.”

 

Then she hauls herself to her feet, a little unsteady from the drink, and makes her way carefully down the stairs. He watches her until the shadows claim her, and she becomes just one of the many darkened figures in Skyhold’s courtyard. She’ll be gone at dawn, as she said. He won’t see her again till this is over. If then; if ever.

 

_“You watch her back, Blondie,”_ he thinks at a man he hasn’t wanted to see in years. _“You watch her back at Weisshaupt or I’ll hunt you down myself.”_

 

In Varric’s stories Hawke is immortal. He’s made sure of that. They’ll talk about the Champion a hundred years from now, and every kid in Thedas will know her name. But the real Hawke is better than the one in his stories. Sure, she’s older and sadder, she’s fallible and she’s afraid – but she’s also the best friend he’s ever had. And there’s nothing he can do to protect her at all. So Varric just watches her go, and prays to Andraste or the ancestors or Mythal – or anyone else who might be willing to strike a bargain with a lying, cloud-gazer dwarf – that this meeting won’t be their last.


End file.
